▸ Column · Present-day New York — an after-work happy hour, the letter forwarded to Frank Castle
THE PUNISHER replies.
Replied to by The Punisher, with a rebuttal from Captain America.
The letter
I went to my boyfriend's office happy hour and, wanting to sound like a person who reads, announced out of nowhere that I'd "always thought Borges was overrated." I have never opened a Borges book in my life. The woman across the table was a literature professor who wrote her doctorate on Borges. Instead of folding, I doubled down — something vague about "the labyrinth stuff feeling derivative" — and she took me apart point by point in front of eight of his coworkers. I tried claiming I meant "a different Borges," which fooled nobody, then slipped off to get a drink and never came back. My boyfriend hasn't invited me to anything work-related in three weeks. I can't tell if I owe him a real apology or if I need to become a completely different person before we even talk about it.
The Punisher replies
You didn't write to me about Borges. You wrote because you got caught being someone you're not, and now you're standing in the rubble asking whether to apologize or to build a whole new fake person to do the apologizing. Stop.
The professor isn't the threat. The lie is — and it's the slow kind. You say a thing to sound like someone who reads, and a year from now you can't tell which version of you is doing the talking. I've stripped my life down to almost nothing. The one thing I never let go of is knowing exactly what I am. You don't get to perform for strangers and stay honest with yourself. It's one account. You're overdrawing it.
Here's the next move. You owe your boyfriend one clean sentence: you embarrassed him at his own table, you know why, you're done performing where he works. Then ask him straight if that's why the invitations stopped — don't theorize about it, ask. And read the Borges or don't. Either way, quit talking about books you haven't opened.
Don't become a different person. Become an honest one. That's the whole job. The rest is noise.
— The Punisher
Captain America weighs in
Frank's right that you can't fake your way through a life — and I don't agree with him out loud often, so mark the date. But he skipped the fella who actually worries me. Three weeks of silence from a man who's meant to be on your side? That's not you needing a new personality, ma'am. That's him leaving you out in the cold rather than saying one plain word.
Own the embarrassment — that part's yours. Then tell him you'd take being corrected by a professor a hundred times over being frozen out by the person who's supposed to stand next to you. Honesty runs both directions, or it isn't honesty.
— Captain America
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